I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That by Ben Goldacre Read Free Book Online

and chemical testing, immunological experiments, and more.
    Some of the flaws they discovered were bizarre. Four per cent of papers didn’t mention how many animals were used in the experiment, anywhere. The researchers looked in detail at forty-eight studies that did say how many were used: not one explained why that particular number of animals had been chosen. Thirty-five per cent of the papers gave one figure for the number of animals used in the methods, and then a different number of animals appeared in the results. That’s pretty disorganised.
    They looked at how many studies used basic strategies to reduce bias in their results, like randomisation and blinding. If you’re comparing one intervention against another, for example, and you don’t randomly assign animals to each group, then it’s possible you might unconsciously put the stronger animals in the group getting a potentially beneficial experimental intervention, or vice versa, thus distorting your results.
    If you don’t ‘blind’, then you know, as the experimenter, which animals had which intervention. So you might allow that knowledge, even unconsciously, to affect close calls on measurements you take. Or maybe you’ll accept a high blood-pressure reading when you expected it to be high, knowing what you do about your own experiment, but then double-check a high blood-pressure measurement in an animal where you expected it to be low.
    Only 12 per cent of the animal studies used randomisation. Only 14 per cent used blinding. And the reporting was often poor. Only 8 per cent gave the raw data, allowing you to go back and do your own analysis. About half the studies left the numbers of animals in each group out of their tables.
    I grew up friends with the daughters of Colin Blakemore, a neuroscientist in Oxford who has taken courageous risks over many decades to speak out and defend necessary animal research. My first kiss – not one of those sisters, I should say – was outside a teenage party in a church hall, in front of two Special Branch officers sitting in a car with their lights off.
    People who threaten the lives of fifteen-year-old girls, to shut their father up, are beneath contempt. People who fail to damn these threats are similarly contemptible. That’s why it sticks in the throat to say that the reporting and conduct of animal research is often poor; but we have to be better.

Observations on the Classification of Idiots
    Guardian , 18 August 2007
    Every now and then something comes along which is so bonkers and so unhinged that it unmoors itself from all cultural anchoring points, and floats off into a baffling universe all of its own. I am an enthusiast for bad ideas, but nothing prepared me for this, in the academic journal Medical Hypotheses : an article called ‘Down Subjects and Oriental Population Share Several Specific Attitudes and Characteristics’.
    You’d be right to experience a shudder of nervousness at the title alone, since this is an academic journal, from 2007, and not 1866, when John Langdon Down wrote his classic ‘Observations on the Ethnic Classification of Idiots’. That paper was the first to describe Down’s syndrome (which Down called ‘mongolism’), and in it the author explained that different forms of genetic disorder were in fact evolutionary regressions to what he viewed as the less advanced, non-white forms of humanity. He described an Ethiopian form of ‘idiot’, a mongoloid form, and so on. Looking back, it reads as spectacularly offensive.
    Now. People with Down’s syndrome – who have three copies of chromosome 21, learning difficulties and other congenital health problems – do indeed look, to Westerners, a tiny bit like people from East Asia. This is because they have something called an ‘epicanthic fold’, a piece of skin that joins the upper part of the nose to the inner part of the eyebrow. It makes the eyes almond-shaped. You’ll find epicanthic folds on faces from East Asia,